Poll: Spam Is a Top Distraction

Costly waste of user time is the worst effect of workplace spam, according to a recent poll.

Costly waste of user time is the worst effect of workplace spam, according to an interactive poll of several hundred participants in a Ziff Davis Media eSeminar late last month. Almost three-fifths of seminar attendees named employee distraction as their top concern, ranking it far ahead of IT department burdens or legal issues such as "hostile workplace" liability.
Would-be solution providers should take their cue by minimizing user involvement in e-mail content control. Individual mailbox training of Bayesian rules, for example, may just substitute one distraction for another.

The prospects seem brighter for higher-level solutions, such as sender identification, that can operate at or outside the enterprise perimeter.

Market acceptance of any solution, though, looks to be hard to achieve. Another poll response during the same eSeminar showed that buyers want to preserve the openness, immediacy, nonproprietary nature and freedom from burdensome regulation that have made e-mail so successfulwhile also paving the way, sad to say, for its abuse.
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Peter Coffee is Director of Platform Research at salesforce.com, where he serves as a liaison with the developer community to define the opportunity and clarify developers' technical requirements on the company's evolving Apex Platform. Peter previously spent 18 years with eWEEK (formerly PC Week), the national news magazine of enterprise technology practice, where he reviewed software development tools and methods and wrote regular columns on emerging technologies and professional community issues.Before he began writing full-time in 1989, Peter spent eleven years in technical and management positions at Exxon and The Aerospace Corporation, including management of the latter company's first desktop computing planning team and applied research in applications of artificial intelligence techniques. He holds an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine University, he has held teaching appointments in computer science, business analytics and information systems management at Pepperdine, UCLA, and Chapman College.